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A mistake in Cohoes allowed non-Democrats to vote in a Democratic primary.

THE STAKES:

There's enough manufactured concern out there without real errors adding to the doubts about the validity of elections.

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Elections officials will eventually sort out the obvious mess in Cohoes, where 19 people who should not have voted on primary day apparently ended up casting ballots. It's the less apparent mess that will be harder — and even more imperative — to clean up.

There is no good time to make mistakes in an election, but this one comes at a particularly bad moment, amid growing societal concern about our election system. The people running our elections must recognize that such errors taint more than one race.

(Will Waldron/Times Union)

The June 25 primary in Cohoes was thrown into confusion after officials said 19 non-Democrats cast ballots. That left what looks to be a tie in the Fifth Ward Common Council race. It may take a new election to settle the question.

The mistake was blamed on an election inspector who believed — wrongly — that recent changes in state law allowed people not enrolled in a particular party to vote in the primary of their choosing.

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How such a misunderstanding occurred is something the Albany County Board of Elections needs to get to the bottom of and explain how it will better train election workers so that this, or any other such error, doesn't happen again. That needs to be a public process. Voters deserve the reassurance that only transparency can provide.

The stakes go far beyond Cohoes. Public trust in the accuracy of our voting systems has been declining for years. An Axios poll last year found that 34 percent of Americans were either "not very confident," or "not at all confident," that votes would be correctly counted in the 2018 midterm elections.

It's not hard to see why. Americans have learned that Russia went to great lengths to tamper with the 2106 election, not only through propaganda on social media but by trying to hack directly into our election systems. Even before that election, then-presidential candidate Donald Trump was stoking doubt about the election being "rigged." After the election that assertion came from both sides: Mr. Trump, who lost the popular vote even through he took enough states to win the Electoral College, speculated without a shred of evidence that millions of people had voted illegally for his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, while many Clinton supporters looked skeptically at Mr. Trump's narrow win in a few decisive states and wondered if something was amiss (such as whether the Russian manipulation had been effective).

New York Republicans have stoked further doubts, suggesting that the passage of legislation allowing undocumented immigrants to get driver's licenses could also allow non-citizens to vote. Those doubts were amplified when a bill to allow New Yorkers to be automatically registered to vote if they interact with a state agency had to be withdrawn in late June because of a typographical error that would have allowed undocumented immigrants to be registered to vote.

We can't have these kinds of sloppy mistakes, whether it's in poorly crafted legislation or poorly trained election workers. When one in three voters don't have faith in our country's most basic democratic mechanism, it throws not just elections into doubt, but the legitimacy of those who govern us.